So many parallels between our current pandemic and the plague that swept through London in 1665, at least as described by Daniel Defoe in Journal  of the Plague Year.  It’s a novel, written many years later in – 1722 – by a remarkably talented fabulator. So always good to take it with a shovel of salt.

But here’s one big difference – the common sense denying COVIDIOTS of 2020.  

In Defoe’s London, people were quite rationally filled with terror and trepidation before the plague took hold. It was in their fear that common sense and reason took flight and when they looked for signs and premonitions and fell prey to delusions and the deluded. 

One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than
as I have said in St Giles’s), I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of
people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and
found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them
appeared plain to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a
fiery sword in his hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She
described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion
and the form, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so
much readiness; ‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one; ‘there’s the sword
as plain as can be.’ Another saw the angel. One saw his very face, and
cried out what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and
one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so
much willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could
see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the
sun upon the other part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but
could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must
have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and
fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I
really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor
people were terrified by the force of their own imagination. However,
she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me
that it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful judgements were
approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.

By contrast we have crowds gathering on Florida beaches for Spring Break in defiance of health recommendations and politicians claiming it is all an overhyped hoax.

The Phantom Plague

Various evangelical churches have refused to accept scientific advice and instead proclaimed the virus to be – not a scourge from God – but a political scheme.

Here’s Florida Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne of Tampa Bay feeding the skepticism of his right-wing evangelical congregation. He told them that the coronavirus is a “phantom plague” designed to lull them into receiving vaccines that are part of a plot to kill them as a population control measure. 

And who is Howard-Brown?  Oh! just one of those extremists on the whacked-out, religious fringe – one of the ministers invited to the White House to lay hands on Trump as part of his evangelical outreach.

We can be amused by, or pity, the poor people of Defoe’s London who, driven, by terror fell into the snares of the charlatans and frauds. And despise those he describes as exploiting those fears.

But what to make of Howard-Brown reassuring his packed unsocially distanced congregation that their faith protected them. He told them to turn and hug one another. 

“Listen, this has to be the safest place. If you can’t be safe in church, you’re in serious trouble.”

And then, a gratuitous piece of homophobia to wrap it up:

I got news for you. This church will never close. The only time the church is closed is when the Rapture is taking place… This bible school is open because we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.

I guess we should check back in with Pastor Howard-Brown in a week or so.

No doubt the scourge from God theory will reassert itself and the virus become the righteous punishment from the almighty on account of … name your favorite go-to evangelical sin … abortion! homosexuality! social welfare! Democrats!

God Speaks to a Prayer Warrior

And then there’s the billionaire Hobby Lobby owner who wrote a company-wide letter explaining that the stores would remain open because his wife was a “prayer warrior” who had received a message from God. COVID-17 precautions be damned. And of course, encourage sick employees to go to work because hourly workers – i.e. any one who isn’t a manager –  are not entitled to any paid sick leave.

And just last week a variety of vendors at the house who told me:

1. He didn’t have to worry about taking any precautions and he never gets sick because in his line of work – septic tank pumping – he has been exposed to so much bacteria that he has a built-in immunity and

2. That this virus thing is totally exaggerated and a political hype and last year 37,000 Americans died of the flu.

The latter all trumpian talking points promoted by FoxNews. And all this after the gilded palace of Mar-a-Lago had been exposed as a petri dish of pestilence and a hot zone of contagion.

So while the rest of us were social distancing, self-isolating and getting ready to hunker, these guys were still extending their hands for a shake. And  these potential vectors of death are out there traveling from house to house. Oh! Boy. 

Crackpottery

In Defoe’s day people were worried, indeed terrified, about the plague before it became pandemic. Many set about trying to avoid it by fleeing the city or by prayer, fasting and supplication to God. Others flocked to quacks and charlatans for cures and preventatives. In mass hysteria Defoe’s Londoners ran about in search of relief and remedy.

Crackpot theories and crackpot theorists and frauds were legion. 

And we have our own fine examples. How’s this for  top notch crackpottery:

In Florida’s Okeechobee County the Commissioner Bryant Culpepper promoted  a totally absurd remedy he had gleaned from a conspiracy theory website: The corona virus – he claimed – was killed  by high temperatures and that the solution was to “hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.”

Needless to say this is complete nonsense. And ditto all those other swirling rumors about the efficacy of gargling with vinegar, drinking water every fifteen minutes, and starting every meal with a mug of boiled garlic water. 

Widespread delusions and hysteria in a time of pandemic seems timeless. Defoe’s Londoner’s did not know about germs and bacteria and viruses. But they did know about contagion and acted accordingly. the measures London took to manage the spread of the plague mirror the precautions now in effect in new York City. One difference being that in Defoe’s London the infected were often shut up into their houses, the doors padlocked and a watchman stationed outside. 

We, however, do have the benefit of a whole lot more information. We know how the virus works and how it spreads. And if only we could all heed the advice to stay home and follow all precautions we could halt the spread. But … human nature …

A Defoe Erasure: Hellish Trumpery

I might spend a great deal of time in my exclamations against the
follies, and indeed the wickedness, of those things, in a time of such
danger, in a matter of such consequences as this, of a national
infection. But my memorandums of these things relate rather to take
notice only of the fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor
people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them
were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into the
common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery
hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along.

Follies and wickedness
in a time of danger –
of a national infection.
The fact of hellish
trumpery
remains.